As soon as they belted up, in deep, foam armchairs with a suction-bottomed decanter and glasses already on a little table between them, the aircraft hurled itself into the air. The acceleration was frightening. The way the ground dropped away beneath them was not to be believed. Strangely, there was less noise than she had expected, far less than the warm-up roar of a clamjet.
“How quiet,” she said, leaning away from Sir Tam’s casually chummy arm.
He chuckled. “That’s five thousand kilometers an hour for you. We leave the sound far behind. Do you like it?”
“Oh, yes,” said Nan, trying to prevent him from pouring her a drink. She failed.
“Your voice sounds more like ‘oh, no.’ ”
“Well, yes, perhaps that is so. It is terribly wasteful of oil, Sir Tam.”
“We don’t burn oil, sweetie! Pure hydrogen and oxygen — have to carry them both, this far up. Not an ounce of pollution.”
“But of course one burns oil, or some other fuel, to make the hydrogen.” She wondered if she could keep the conversation on propellant chemistry all the way across the Atlantic, decided not, and took a new tack. “It is frightening. One can see nothing from these tiny windows.”
“What is there to see? You get turned on by clouds, love?”
“I have flown the oceans many times, Sir Tam. There is always something. Sometimes icebergs. The sea itself. In a clamjet there is the excitement of the landfall as one approaches Newfoundland or Rio or the Irish Coast. But at twenty-five thousand meters there is nothing.”
“I couldn’t agree with you more,” said Sir Tam, unstrapping and moving closer. “If I had my way there’d be no windows in the thing at all.”
Nan moistened her lips with the whiskey and said brightly, “But it is all so exciting. Could you perhaps show me around this aircraft?”
“Show you around?”
“Yes, please. It is so new to me.”
“What’s to see, love?” Then he shrugged. “Matter of fact, yes, there are a few features I’d like to call to your attention.”
She stood up gratefully, glad to get his hand off her knee. The headaches had lessened, perhaps because now they were breathing quite pure air instead of the Glaswegian smog, but she was annoyed. He had made it clear that they were the only passengers; that was not deceitful. But she had expected at least the chaperonage of the stewardesses, and they, all three of them, had retreated to their little cubbyholes in the aft of the aircraft. The little paneled lounge was far more intimate than she liked.
But worse was in store. What she had thought was a service cubicle turned out to be a tiny, complete bedroom suite. With — could one believe it? — a waterbed. Easily a metric ton of profligately wasted mass! For nothing, surely, but profligately immoral purposes!
“Now there,” said Sir Tam over her shoulder, “is a feature worth studying. Go ahead, Nan. Let your impulses carry you. Try it out.”
“Certainly not!” She moved away from his touching hand and added formally, “Sir Tam, I must tell you that I am an engaged person. It is not correct for me to allow myself to be in a situation of this kind.”
“How quaint.”
“Sir Tam!” She was almost shrieking now, and furiously angry, not only with him but with herself. If she had used a tiny bit of intelligence she would have known this was coming and could have avoided it. A delicate hint that this was the wrong time. A suggestion of — what? Of a social disease, if necessary. Anything. But she was trapped, the waterbed before her, this gland case behind, already with his lips against her ear, whispering buzzingly so that her headache exploded again. Desperately she caught at a straw.
“We — we were speaking of Godfrey Menninger?”
“What?”
“Godfrey Menninger. The father of my good friend, Captain Marge Menninger. You spoke of him in the hotel.”
He was silent for a moment, neither releasing her nor trying to pull her closer. “Do you know God Menninger well?”
“Only through his daughter. I was able to keep her from going to jail once.”
His arm was definitely less tight. After a moment he patted her gently and stepped away. “Let’s have a drink,” he said, ringing for the stewardesses. The satyr’s smile had been replaced by the diplomat’s.
The conversation was back on its tracks again, for which Ana was intensely grateful. She even managed to return to the little cubicle with the armchairs and to persuade the stewardess to bring her a nice cup of strong chai instead of the whiskey Gulsmit suggested. He seemed greatly interested in the story of Margie Menninger’s little episode, in every detail. Had they been fingerprinted? Was the people’s magistrate a court of record, whatever that was? Had Ana spoken to anyone in the militia about the incident later on, and if so what had they said?
Such trivial things seemed to interest him, but Nan was content to go on dredging up memories for him all the way across the Atlantic, as long as it meant his keeping his hands to himself. When she was wrung dry he leaned back, nursing the new drink the stewardess had poured for him and squinting out at the blue-black and cloudless sky.
“Very interesting,” he said at last. “That poor little girl. Of course, I’ve known her since she was tiny.” It had not occurred to Ana that Margie Menninger had ever been tiny. She let it pass, and Sir Tam added, “And dear old God. Have you known him long?”
“Not in a personal sense,” she said, careful not to add lying to the fault of being untruthful. “Of course he is of great importance in cultural matters. I too am deeply concerned about culture.”
“Culture,” repeated Sir Tam meditatively. He seemed about to produce a real smile but managed to retain the diplomatic one instead. “You are a dear, Nan,” he said, and shook his wristwatch to make the red numerals blink on. “Ah, almost there,” he said regretfully. “But of course you must allow me to escort you to your hotel.”
The morning session of the UN was exhausting. There was no time for a real lunch because she had to post-edit the computer translations of what she had already translated once that morning before they could be printed. And the afternoon session was one long catfight.
The debate was on fishing rights for Antarctic krill. Because it was food, tempers ran high. And because sea lore is almost as old an area of human interest as eating, the translation was demanding. There were no places where she could coast, no technical words that were new-coined and common to almost all languages. Every language had developed its own words for ships, seamanship, and above all, eating, at the dawn of language itself. Only three of Nan’s languages were in use — Bulgarian, English, and Russian. The Pakistanis were not involved in the debate, and there were plenty of others proficient in the Romance languages. So there were long periods when she could listen without having to speak. But there was no rest even in those periods; she needed to remember every word she could. The UN delegates had the awful habit of quoting each other at length — sometimes with approval, sometimes with a sneer, always with the risk of some tiny hairsplit that she had to get just right. Her headaches were immense.
That was, of course, the price you paid for having the two hemispheres of your brain surgically sliced apart. Not to mention the stitching back of parts of them that kept you from stumbling into things or falling down, or the DNA injections that left your neck swollen and your eyes bulging for weeks at a time and sometimes caused seizures indistinguishable from epilepsy. That had been a surprise. They hadn’t told her about those things when she signed up to become a split-brain translator — not really. You never did know what pain was going to be until you had it.